With lurid headlines, unproven charges and downright falsehoods he and his staff pollute the public mind with statements, attributed to unnamed officials in "Both City and County Health Departments," such as SDs (sex deviates) "are responsible for 85 per cent of the 1000 per cent increase in venereal disease in Hollywood in the last few years." Public health officials have assured ONE that they have given Heyler, or his staff, no such figures. Clearly, someone is lying. The Citizen-News, in a smelly outpouring of the drearily familiar, shrills that: SDs are "responsible for 60 per cent of the crime in this city;" they pose, according to Inspector James Fisk of the Los Angeles Police vice enforcement section, "a greater threat to the community than narcotic addicts;" from SDs come "dishonor, disease, death;" homosexuals "recruit;" lenient judges coddle them. ONE Magazine can hardly lend its pages to the printing of more examples of this kind of irresponsible journalism.

The point to be made here is neither the falsity of such charges nor the paranoid motivations behind them, but rather that in 1963 Dave Heyler should have been able, from the vantage point of a newspaper with but a few thousand circulation and no journalistic standing whatever, actually to elicit support from judges, police officials, City councilmen, legislators and even Stanley Mosk, Attorney General of this nation's most populous state, is well-nigh incredible. Are public morality and concepts of social responsibility gone from our midst, ONE asks?

Unhappily, this all could happen anywhere; that Hollywood is the site of the most recent outbreak is purely incidental. Our eyes must be opened to the fact that the battle for the rights of American citizens, heterosexual or homosexual, which ONE has for years been waging is yet far from having been won.

The next infection of "mad-dog journalism," preying upon ignorance, fear and public confusion could well strike in your own city. None of us can afford to shake our heads complacently over the atrocities of Nazi Germany when men of the Heyler stripe in our midst are recommending that "the SD who flagrantly violates the laws of God, man and nature should be separated from society until it is determined by proper authorities he can live in society as an asset rather than a liability." History shows us how short a step it is from locking people up to the gas chamber.

Those of us who have respect for the American way of life are vividly aware that such talk of "proper authorities;" of the setting of class against class; and the hysterical generating of hate campaigns are all but tools and disguises for some very ugly motives which have no place in a moral, democratic society.

A most respected medical authority, Otto Fenichel, M.D., has written in his definitive textbook, The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis, "Many persons combat homosexuality in society instead of feeling guilt about their own unconscious homosexuality; or they are intolerant of some kind of behavior in others, while unaware that they, too, manifest it."

-Richard Conger

ASSOCIATE EDITOR

5